Forget about glamorous evening gowns, glittery jewels, and star-studded parties for General Hospital's Leslie Charleson. She prefers riding boots, jodhpurs, and spending time with her beautiful Andarra.

It was love at first sight.
Leslie Charleson looked into the big, limpid eyes ringed by long white lashes, and she knew this was it. A white Andalusian, standing a little more than five hands high: Andarra, the horse of her dreams.
Before you could canter around the paddock, Andarra was Leslie's. That was five years ago, and these days when Leslie's not in Los Angeles at the ABC studio portraying Dr. Monica Quartermaine on General Hospital, or helping her husband, Bill Demms, put the finishing touches on their new house, or playing with Freeway, her cocker spaniel, she may be found at the nearby Paddock Riding Club, grooming, training, and riding Andarra.

Outfitted in riding boots and togs, her short blond hair ruffled by a rare Los Angeles breeze, Leslie lights from her car at the stable, then brightens and picks up her pace when she spots her waiting horse. Patting Andarra's neck happily and sneaking her a carrot when the horse's trainer, Art Gayton, isn't looking, Leslie spends some time joshing comfortably with Art and his young granddaughter and partner, Jessica.
She's at ease and contented. "It's exhilarating," she explains thoughtfully. "What I like is that it has nothing to do with the studio. It's like switching gears. I'm not judged on whether or not I can act. The people here are more interested in talking about my horse than me - I like that."
She also frankly likes her fellow Andalusian owners and considers them family. They've gone Christmas caroling together, ridden in the Rose Bowl Parade and the Hollywood Christmas Parade, and taken part in horse shows. On weekends, they may meet and ride the trails through the nearby hills, stopping for breakfast together at the adjoining golf course. (Trail riding is an activity in which Bill, whom Leslie describes as a "good-sport rider," sometimes joins her.) In March, she'll travel with stable pals to an Andalusian show in Costa Rica.
Leslie's equine love affair began before she'd even started kindergarten.
"As a kid, I wanted to ride more than anything," she says. "I went through every single book, everything there was on horses. " (Leslie's house is still filled with literature about horses; horse art hangs on the walls, and an antique rocking horse sits by the dining-room table.) "My grandparents had an overstuffed chair. I got a leather strap, I got stirrups, and I rode that chair until it collapsed! "

Dreams of riding consumed the youngster's imagination, and she would amuse herself with her fantasies in the early morning hours before anyone else was up. "For a year I was Hopalong Cassidy," she grins. "I wore nothing but black; our dining-room table was a buckboard, and I took my two guns to meals."
When she was seven, riding got real - and serious. Her parents had by then divorced, and her mother remarried. The new family moved to Rowayton, Connecticut, where Leslie enrolled in author Margaret Cable Self's New Canaan Mounted Troop.
"It was like a military academy," Leslie reports. "We had to take care of the horses from grooming to cleaning the tack to learning about parts of the bridle, saddle, and horse. We had quizzes, and we got bars for sportsmanship and clean boots."
Leslie loved it and says she didn't realize until much later just how fortunate she was to have had that sort of training. "You had no fear of horses because you were all over them, under them, around them. Since then, I've been to places where they deliver the horse to you, put you on it, help you off, and take it away. Left to your own devices, you might not know a bridle from a saddle. "
No such danger with Miss Self's troop. "We drilled; we marched; then we rode. We were good."

But the course of horse-love was interrupted. The family moved back to Illinois, to Lake Forest, and in junior high Leslie discovered the opposite sex. "Boys skied, so I learned to ski and stopped riding for a while."
She also found a new attraction, one that captured her heart as surely as horses once did. It started with a recording of Kay Thompson's story of Eloise, the little girl who lived in the Plaza Hotel. Leslie performed the Eloise routine at a school assembly, and she liked what happened. "People laughed and clapped, and I thought, 'This is great. This I could get into."

Leslie's love of acting continued throughout her schooling, and after graduating from college, she went to New York to find fame. Much to her delight, she found it. She appeared in everything from soap operas and commercials to prime time, films, and theater. In 1977, she took over the role of Dr. Monica Quartermaine (from actress Patsy Rahn) on GH, and she's been there ever since.
Then seven years ago, her first love rode back into her life. The call to her affections came, she says, because of Anna Lee (Lila Quartermaine).

A horsewoman herself, Anna Lee has a daughter who owns horses in New Mexico and a granddaughter who is one of the youngest riders on the U. S. Olympic team. "Anna Lee asked myself and Steve Bond (ex-Jimmy Lee Holt) if we would go to Albuquerque to do a benefit called Cloud Dancers, a group that helps special children by putting them on horses, " Leslie recalls. Anna's daughter gave Leslie a horse (named Alan Quartermaine!) to ride, and like the proverbial bicycle, "that's all it took."
On her return to Los Angeles, Leslie began taking lessons at the local equestrian center-riding, jumping, and working out every day. All did not go entirely smoothly, however. She bought a horse-which at first seemed the fulfillment of a childhood dream-but the animal turned out to be, she claims, "crazy." A master at getting rid of riders, he threw Leslie hard and even sent one of her friends to the hospital. "I was scared, " she admits.
But there was a silver lining to this equine cloud. While attempting to deal with the unmanageable animal, she met trainer Art Gayton and moved her horse (which later contracted hepatitis and died) to Paddock Riding Club.

It was because of Art, who favors Andalusians, a Spanish breed, that Leslie met Andarra. He had asked Leslie to ride in the Rose Bowl Parade and brought some horses out for her viewing. "I took one look at her, and that was it," says Leslie of Andarra. "There was something in her eyes, and I thought, "That's the nicest horse! " She adds with satisfaction, "She's not proved me wrong. She is the nicest horse I ever met."
Fate brought her Andarra and, later, even more. Two years ago, at her Connecticut friends' high-school class reunion, romance blossomed when she got reacquainted with an old friend from her teen-age years, Bill Demms.
"Things just clicked, " she says. " Before that, I was just too occupied with working, too selfish to let anybody else be more important."
Bill changed that, and after nine months of cross-country commuting (itself an act of commitment from a man who hates to fly), the couple married.
Not without considerable upheaval. "We did everything that marriage experts advise you not to do, " Leslie says, shaking her head. "That is, relocate, buy a house, gut a house. And he had to move out here for me [from the East Coast] and start a business. It was a whirlwind. "
Even with the demands of GH and setting up a new household, Leslie finds time for Andarra. She explains that the best part of her new home is how close it is to the stable.
"It would only be better," says Leslie Charleson, smiling, "if Andarra. were in my backyard. "

By Pat Hilton, Episodes Jan/Feb 1991